The following Blog Post has been contributed by one of our local associate web dev companies in Kingston. Jeff Sturgis, owner of Develevation, wrote this great article about SEO and SEM.
I wish I had a nickle for every time a Kingston business told me they weren't concerned about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The reasons are endless, but the commonality is the same. They just don't get it.
Eventually almost every business that didn't want SEO changes their mind. It usually happens when they search for their business through Google and can't find it.
The combined knowledge of Kingston SEO services and Kingston Web Design Companies have joined forces to compile a list of the most common mistakes businesses make in the beginning before they understand SEO.
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Not Taking SEO Seriously
As I discussed already, this is the first mistake made by Kingston businesses. Many have the tendency to cut corners in terms of cost, or have a "build it and they will come" attitude. This is just not practical. Your website has to be promoted in some way for people to visit. Why should Google give you a good ranking for your brand new site? If you want to cut corners, you will have to lower your expectations in terms of what traffic will be brought in to your website.
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Lack of Keyword Research
Before you write the text on your web pages, you have to know what search engine results you want to rank for. Clients have actually told me "Remove all the instances of Kingston on my pages because everybody knows my business is in Kingston." and they later asked "Why don't I rank for Kingston Chiropractor?". The answer is, you removed all the instances of Kingston off your website. When Google looks at your pages, it doesn't associate any of them with Kingston.
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Targeting Wrong Keywords
Again, this goes back to doing proper keyword research. But instead of not doing keyword research, you do it wrong. You end up targeting keywords that don't line up with what you are trying to achieve. For example, you want to sell Sofas online. But you were raised in Britain where they call it a Chesterfield. Going after "Chesterfields Kingston" will bring you no traffic.
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Too Few Keywords
If you only make a single mention of your keywords on your web page, search engines have a tough time figuring out the topic of your page. In order to clarify this for search engines, you need to mention your keywords a few times and it helps to use different variations such as synonyms. This gets you ranking for the synonyms too.
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Too Little Content
If you have a web page that only has your keywords over and over again, do not expect to rank well. Search engines assume that users want informative results. Having a web page with very few words on it, doesn't help users figure out how to solve their problems and for that reason gets poor search engine rankings. Even if you get decent search engine rankings by doing that, you are making it very easy for people to outrank you.
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Expecting Too Much
In order to be at the top of Google for keywords you are after, you have to put more SEO effort in than the top ranking sites. This is the best way I can explain to get your expectations in line. If you are after an aggressive global market such as "buy flowers online", you need to realize that the top ranking sites have put in thousands, or maybe even millions of dollars to rank there. But, if you are looking to rank for "flower store Kingston", you can get excellent targeted traffic and with much less competition. Even if you are lucky enough to rank at the top for a search term, your competition will always try to outrank you. If/when their efforts exceed yours, it will put them ahead of you.
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Ignoring Link Text
Google pioneered the algorithm that weighs link text in terms of relevancy. Getting links to your website, helps Google realize that people like you. But the text in those links is of tremendous importance. One of the biggest mistakes people make is putting "Click Here" as their anchor text. You will never rank in Google for those words, and why would you want to? Instead, link to your website with your keywords in the anchor text like Kingston SEO Services. Also, it looks much more natural to Google if you link to your site with different variations of your keywords. It wont hurt your search engine ranking to place links like Kingston SEO and SEO Services Kingston around the internet.
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Ignoring the Title Tag
Every web page should have a title tag. This tag is weighed pretty heavily in terms of relevancy, so this is a great place to put words you want to rank for.
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Ignoring URLs
The URL of a website can and should have keywords in it. The domain may have keywords in it, but don't worry too much about that. The page itself can have keywords. So putting http://www.develevation.com/kingston-services/seo.html will help you rank for "kingston services seo". When creating your URLs, keep in mind that underscores are treated differently than dashes by Google. Underscores are treated as underscores and not removed. Dashes are removed and treated as a space. The URL http://www.develevation.com/kingston_seo_services would only help you rank for "kingston_seo_services" which nobody ever searches for.
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Site is Too Flashy
When you create a website that is rich with Flash content, you need to be sure that the page is complimented by descriptive text or an alternative HTML version. Flash is used mainly for animation, and without words to describe the animation, search engines can't determine what search terms are relavent.
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Images with no alt tags
Similar to Flash and animation, images are also used to convey messages to users. But sometimes these messages are not understood by search engines. If your web page has an image with a paragraph of text, it is going to take quite a bit more effort for a search engine to run a character recognition software over the image and pull out the text so that the text can be indexed. Don't assume that a search engine will do that for you. You should almost never put that much text in an image. When you place images on your website, you can use the alt tag to describe the image. This is a great place to put keywords that are relevant to the image.
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Not Knowing About Page Rank
Not all links are not created equal. A link from CNN.com carries much more value to search engines than a brand new blog. A sites page rank is measured by how many people link to it and the quality of those back-links. You can see page rank through tools such as Google's Toolbar. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! have been linked to so many times that they have a page rank of 9 or 10 out of 10. Each web page URL has it's own individual page rank.
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Not using 301 Redirects
This is a slightly more advanced topic, but still a very common mistake among new developers. A redirect is when one page forwards to another page. For example, I might want http://www.example.com/ to actually go to http://www.example.com/home.html. There are several ways to accomplish this, but the proper way to do it is to use a 301 redirect in your headers that tells robots that the page has permanently moved. If you do not use this header, robots will treat it as a temporary move and not properly assign the link credit. So what happens is, if you spread a bunch of links around the internet that point to http://www.example.com/ that page would have a lot of page rank. But that doesn't help http://www.example.com/home.html because it doesn't redirect with a 301 header. By putting the 301 redirect header in place, all the links that pointed to http://www.example.com/ are credited to http://www.example.com/home.html and that will boost the page rank.
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Not Knowing About Canonical
Again, this is a slightly more advanced topic. And again, like 301 redirects, link tag with attribute rel='canonical' can properly assign all the linking power to the correct page. If you have similar content on your website, and by that I mean duplicate content, you should use this tag to credit all links to one particular page. For example, if you have a page that displays 6 search results and another page that displays the same 6 search results in a different order and you have half the links pointing to one page, and half the links pointing to the other page, then both pages would be indexed by Google and the page rank will be half of what it could be. When you put the canonical tag in place, it will ensure all of your linking power is assigned to one page and can do so without the 301 redirect.
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Not Knowing About nofollow
Many sites put rel='nofollow' attributes in their anchor tags. This tells robots not to count the link and therefore carries no page rank. When you are shopping around for high quality back-links, be sure to keep this in mind. It is common for advertisers, blogs and forums to do this. You actually have to look at the source code to know whether or not you will be getting a link that counts. Sometimes links that don't count can bring in some great targeted traffic. I am not saying to avoid these links altogether. I am just saying it is a mistake to start link building without knowing about nofollow links.
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Ignoring Meta Tags
The description meta tag is often used by Google as the text that displays in the search results. If you don't have this tag, Google will probably figure out another way to display result text. But still, if you can find out what keywords people are using to land on your page, the meta tags can help you appeal to users and can even convince them to click on your search engine result because the information on your site is described better than those with higher results.
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No Analytics
Google Analytics or other anayltics tools can help you see what people are searching for to get to your site. Sometimes all it takes to boost your ranking is just adding one or two more instances of these keywords to make your page more relavent.
Search Engine Optimization is a science. The traffic search engines bring to websites is so valuable that people dedicate themselves to it as a profession and companies do as well. The reason search engine traffic is so sought after is because it is inbound marketing. If you are trying to sell your business in Kingston, and you sell patio furniture, think about two ways of promoting your business:
1) Put up a billboard on Sir John A MacDonald that shows your store2) Rank well in Google for people searching "patio furniture Kingston" The first way might expose you to the entire city. But even the people that want to buy patio furniture aren't necessarily in the mode to do so. The concentration of people looking to buy through search engines is much higher. So with a little Search Engine Optimization backed by a great website, you can convince users that your store is worth checking out.
There are many mistakes you can make when you are first optimizing your website for search engines. There are even some methods, that I wont get into, that could have you banned from search engines. When you want your site optimized, it is best to let a professional take care of it. You can hire a professional Search Engine Optimization Company in Kingston to handle all of your keyword research and start building your links to boost your search engine rankings.
This article was contributed by Jeff Sturgis from Develevation. Develevation specializes in Kingston Web Development and Internet Marketing. Thanks to CDyWeb for allowing us to post in their blog.
